A Heads-Up Approach to Teaching Spanish

Saying that professor Rafael Chabran’s Spanish class is a language course is something like saying Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is about Russia.

The main purpose of the class at Whittier College is to help students who grew up speaking Spanish at home to perfect their conversational and writing skills. The course is part of the budding “heritage language” movement in American education designed largely for the sons and daughters of immigrants.

But Chabran also uses “Spanish for Bilingual Students” to provide counseling and support to students who often are the first in their families to attend college.

He juggles those objectives with an unusual style: The twice weekly sessions sometimes resemble a gym class. Chabran, 56, a 5-foot-4 1/2-inch bundle of kinetic energy, is a proponent of the total physical response method of language instruction. It’s based on the idea that language learning is enhanced when it is tied to movement and activities.

Chabran likes to create that action by tossing around a soccer ball. Just as keeping your eye on the ball is good advice on the baseball diamond or golf course, it’s absolutamente essential in Chabran’s class. If he tosses you the ball, it’s your turn to answer a question or make a comment.

In fact, the fast-paced class -- which is taught immersion-style, entirely in Spanish -- often begins with Chabran barking, “Dame la pelota!” (Give me the ball!) When it’s time for one of the 12 students to give a classmate a turn to talk, Chabran often commands, “Pasala!” (“Pass it!”)

The ball is passed around frequently, keeping the class moving -- and engaged. “A soccer ball is part of the culture,” he explained. Soccer “is one of the things that ties all Spanish-speaking countries together.”

For students who tend to get drowsy during afternoon classes, Chabran’s 80-minute sessions, which begin at 1:30, are a welcome antidote. “This technique keeps us going. He’s constantly moving,” said Luciano Cota, a freshman in the class. “He’s just everywhere.”

During a recent class session, the students quizzed Chabran about his background, then paired off to drill one another on the names of articles of clothing and parts of the body. Throughout the class, Chabran avoided what he calls “teacher talk” -- lengthy lectures -- and instead found ways to make the students chat with him or one another.

When it’s his turn to talk, Chabran tries to inspire the students by telling his own life story. The son of a Puerto Rican father and Mexican immigrant mother, he earned a doctorate in Spanish literature at UC San Diego.

Learning about his background “really helps me, because I can relate to him in many ways. We’re both Latino, and we struggle the same way. He shares the struggle he faced while he was in college, and a lot of that I’m going through now,” said sophomore Thelma Camarena.

At the same time, Chabran corrects the fluid but error-plagued Spanish of his students. False cognates -- words that are spelled similarly in English and Spanish, but have different meanings -- are a particular problem. During class, he reminded a student who referred to a mailed letter by saying “letra,” that the proper word is “carta.”

Criticizing a Latino student’s Spanish, “especially when your instructor is not from that background, it’s really hard,” Chabran said. “That’s why I’m teaching this class.”

The sensitivity to that issue has paid off for freshman Krystal Diaz. “In this class I feel totally comfortable in asking him something if I don’t know it. I talk Spanish really funny, and he doesn’t laugh at me,” she said.

Chabran’s work extends beyond his own classroom. He is associate dean for academic advisement and director of a federally financed project on campus to help students stay in college until they earn degrees.

Language classes like Chabran’s are part of the “heritage language” movement, directed at improving the skills of immigrants and others who grew up somewhat familiar with a foreign tongue but who want to advance their skills.

The movement stems from the recognition that standard foreign language instruction isn’t the best way to improve the skills of people already comfortable with speaking a second tongue. They typically need help with advanced grammar, sophisticated vocabulary and writing skills, but they don’t need instruction in, say, greetings or other simple conversation.

To improve such heritage language instruction, a University of California group on Friday adopted curriculum guidelines for heritage language classes for all of the system’s campuses. At UCLA, which is emerging as a leader in the field, separate classes already are available for heritage speakers of Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.

One reason for the national push is economic. Policymakers have found that heritage speakers can be brought to levels of high fluency much more quickly than learners starting in a new language from scratch.

“For the first time, there is this recognition that this country has a huge natural resource in the competence these kids have [in foreign languages] when they come to our schools,” said Russell N. Campbell, an emeritus professor of applied linguistics at UCLA.

Campbell said heritage language instruction also can improve the quality of family life in immigrant communities. “We talk about generation gap in our Anglo population, where we share a language. Imagine having parents and grandparents not being able to communicate with their kids,” he said.

In Chabran’s class, however, a major motivation seems to be cultural pride. Cota, a native of Arizona, said that when he came to Los Angeles to attend Whittier it struck him how many American-born Latinos spoke Spanish.

“That motivated me to take a Spanish class to get on the same track they are,” he said.